What is Squarespace? Squarespace Review

Squarespace is a web publishing platform that makes it easy for anyone to design a website through pre-built templates and/or drag-and-drop functionality. It is a website building tool that also has online store functionality.

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In April 2003, while a student at the University of Maryland, Casalena began coding a prototype of Squarespace. In January 2004, Casalena released the first version of the service tool, and Squarespace was born.

About Squarespace

In addition to its headquarters in New York, Squarespace has offices in Dublin, Ireland, Poland, and Oregon.

Squarespace is a website builder that uses drag and drop. Their initial focus was on making visually appealing websites. Lately, the site is putting more effort into e-commerce and letting its users sell products online. As of now, they have started to become a full-fledged e-commerce platform.

Squarespace can help anyone, from e-commerce sellers to emerging artists, build an online presence. Squarespace offers dedicated templates and features to help users build e-commerce websites and sell products online. Squarespace offers a variety of beautiful, modern online store design templates, as well as features such as unlimited product quantities, subscriptions, digital content, or donations. Squarespace online stores also provide services such as tax tools, discount codes, gift cards, secure checkout, and shopping cart abandonment recovery. Not only that, users can also manage online stores using mobile devices and the Squarespace Commerce application.

There aren’t many websites as beautiful as Squarespace. You get access to millions of beautiful images to create your e-commerce website, and you can design your logo using Squarespace’s icon database. Plus, you get analytics, mobile apps, and a developer platform.

The goal of Squarespace is to “help millions of people…share their stories by creating personal websites that are effective, stylish, and easy to manage.”

Advantages

1. Simple and intuitive user interface, very suitable for beginners.

2. The website templates they provide are elegant, beautiful, sophisticated, and all have mobile responsive features. The focus on design also makes Squarespace particularly suitable for selling products that require high-quality images.

3. In addition to this, it also has all the standard options such as product variations, inventory management, unlimited products, coupons, shipping, engineering. The platform also integrates with Shipstation.com for fulfillment and provides excellent customer service.

4. They provide many data points to optimize your website and conversions, including sales, revenue, traffic sources, etc. Marketing tools include SEO settings, social media, blogging, and abandoned checkout recovery. SSL is built into the platform.

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1. Squarespace is somewhat limited in functionality. For example, it has limited payment options (Apple Pay and PayPal only) and lacks important options for more complex stores and large numbers of products or variations.

2. In addition, there is no marketplace for apps to add more features. Your ability to customize the site through code and markup is also very limited. The platform only integrates with a few third-party tools and services.

Logo Changes

At the end of 2018, Squarespace launched a new logo and brand image for its online platform.

Squarespace worked with DIA Studio, François Rappo and Optimo to create a new brand font that is unique in that it features a bold sans serif font that gives the entire font more clarity, as well as edges created by carefully cutting the letterforms. Slightly tilted, the font perfectly echoes the tilt of the logo.

The logo has been slightly tweaked. The old logo’s rounded shape conveys friendliness and intimacy, while the new logo’s flatness exudes a more rigorous look and an overall more interesting feel. The new logo displays the “SS” in the icon a little better, but still has room for abstract ideas. The new logo has a more modern feel, which is more appropriate for Squarespace, a fairly mainstream product/service.

Development History

In 2007, when Casalena graduated, Squarespace had annual revenue of $1 million.

- In July 2010, Squarespace raised $38.5 million in its first round of financing, with investors including Index Ventures and Accel Partners. According to the financing agreement, Squarespace will add three new directors: Getty Images CEO Jonathan Klein, Accel Partners executive Andrew Braccia and Index Ventures executive Dominique Vidal.

-In 2011, Squarespace upgraded to version 6, which included new templates, a grid-based user interface, and other enhancements.

-In April 2014, General Atlantic invested US$40 million in Squarespace.

In 2014, Squarespace version 7 was released, replacing the coding backend with a drag-and-drop interface and adding integration with Google Apps for Work and Getty Images.

In 2015, Squarespace’s revenue reached $100 million and its total number of employees reached 550.

In 2016, Squarespace began selling domain names, competing more directly with GoDaddy; and added an analytics dashboard and PayPal integration.

-In December 2017, Squarespace received $200 million in financing from General Atlantic.